Insights

The Great A-Lister Myth

Maravilla Park / Magnificos Who’s your favourite blogger? Your favourite actor or actress? Your favourite author? Comedian, musician, artist, sports star and any other medium where A-lister seems to be a well-used description?

Now ask yourself – are these people really A-listers?

So a blogger has 20,000 or 50,000 subscribers. Does that make him or her an immediate A-list blogger? Or does it just make them an A-list blogger to those 20,000+ subscribers?

Say that blogger’s content is about marketing. Or PR. Or Internet news. Or some other kind of media-related information.

Is it going to be relevant to someone who wants to read about Murray Mints? Probably not. So, to that reader, the blogger who writes about Murray Mints becomes an A-lister, because the content is meaningful for them.

Take it to other mediums. Let’s look at movies. People like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are hailed as A-listers because their movies are generally accepted to be big at the box office. But does that make them more of an A-lister than someone like Danny Boyle, whose indie movies have generally kicked the blockbuster fare into a cocked hat when it comes to substance?

The point is, A-lists and those on them are relevant to the audience. Your blog can be full of amazing content but if it means squat to me, you’re not an A-lister (at least, not to me). My A-listers are the people I learn from, or who make a difference in my day with their blogs. You can see some of these folks here. But even that’s relevant to me, and may offer little to you.

There’s nothing wrong with tagging folks A-listers. Just don’t hold them up as some sort of Holy Grail when they’re only really A-listers for their audiences.

If you want real, everyday A-listers, take a look in the mirror. You’re an A-lister and you probably don’t even know it. You work to feed your family and keep a roof over your head. You go to movies you have no interest in seeing because your kid wants to. You offer unconditional love and security to your partner when he or she needs it. That’s real A-list work right there.

What defines your A-list?

photo credit: !unite

Making Twitter Sticky

There are a lot of changes happening over at Twitter at the minute. They recently updated their Terms of Service and now they’re working on Project ReTweet, where sharing someone else’s tweet with your connections will be performed differently from the current user-generated method.

As is usual when wide-scale changes happen at a company (or, in this case, on a digital stream), there are both fans and dissenters to the new proposals. That’s normal. But what if Twitter could bypass the need for changes like the retweet one?

Twitter’s reasoning for the change is that it can be a confusing mess for new users, and it’s one of the reasons a lot of new users give up within the first month.

While that’s true, a lot of that comes down to the fact that Twitter itself doesn’t offer a great user guide for newcomers. A really simple FAQ or intro sheet emailed to new users would make all the difference, and then they could advise of user-created options, how they fit in and how best to use them.

This would help settle in new users and create something similar to the WordPress community, where you’d have the official tools as well as the community-created ones that existing users can help with. It’d help people settle in more quickly and get the sticky factor that Twitter needs (if reports that 40% of all new users quit after one month is accurate).

But why stop there? There are other areas that Twitter could help keep new and existing users stay happy.

Kill the Private Spam

This is a major problem for Twitter. We know there’s a chance our public streams will have some spam content. But I don’t recall signing up for private message spam from third-party platforms that I didn’t even register for. Pirate games and mafia clans are just two current examples. How can they get into my private message area when I’m not a user? Not good, Twitter.

Make the Suggested Users List Relevant

When you sign up for a new account, Twitter gives you a list of suggested users. The problem is, this list is usually filled with either celebrities or Twitter “power users”. These accounts can often be amongst the most active and busy as far as content goes – how can that be a good introduction when you’ve just joined? Instead, why not work with something like Twellow, ask a couple of simple questions and use these keywords to offer suggestions that actually make sense? So, people in your locality, industry, interest zones, etc, and ease new users into the system as opposed to scaring them off with hyper feeds to follow.

These are just some options that Twitter could take to make the experience better. They’re nothing major, yet they could possibly make a big difference (at least from a user-friendliness viewpoint).

How about you – how would you make Twitter more sticky?

photo credit: Dustin Diaz

Saturday Shindig

One Man Wrecking Machine by Guster
Download now or listen on posterous

04 One Man Wrecking Machine.mp3 (8115 KB)

Enjoy the weekend guys – make it a good one, and continue to be great in all you do. Stay safe, keep smiling, and catch up with you all soon.

The Powerful Effect of Simplicity

Suddenly things seem crystal clear to me ... Last week was a crazy one for me. I’ve just started a big new project (which I’ll be sharing soon) and getting to grips with it has been information overload from day one (although all good fun).

Add to that some really bad wisdom tooth pain, a lot of community planning for a special November 12for12k collaboration as well as normal day-to-day stuff and little sleep, and I was feeling a little bit frayed.

Then an email landed in my inbox that changed everything with two simple words: “Thank you.”

The email was from Sasha H. Muradali, a great upcoming PR pro over in Miami who has a pretty cool blog over at Little Pink Book PR. It mentioned her newest post, and the fact that the post was tied to one of Sasha’s earliest ones in April of this year.

It turns out that I was one of the first to share Sasha’s blog post on Twitter, and this email from her was to say thank you for that. And that just floored me and made me smile in a big way. I know Sasha’s a busy person; I know she has a lot of things on the go; I know that the reference Sasha was making was almost 6 months ago.

Yet she still remembered, and took the time to say thanks personally. And these two little words turned a frazzled face into a wide grin. Or, as Sasha herself put it, “all gushy feeling semi-girlie inside” (yes, you got me, Sasha!).

There’s something for us all to learn from Sasha. Agree?

photo credit: annia316